About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

I cover films that present the possible danger to western
civilization from gigantic solar storms (and resulting coronal mass ejections),
so I rented the silly SyFy channel film “End of the World”, directed by Steven
R. Monroe, set in British Columbia (of course).

The film rather overdoes things, to say the least. The solar storm results in ball lightning
dropping like “rain” on the ground, frying anyone or anything it hits. This would not happen.

Cars sporadically fail, and that probably would happen only
with an electromagnetic pulse bomb, which (to affect a large area) would be a
high altitude nuclear blast.

The plot gimmick is that the heroes (played by Greg Grunberg
and Neil Grayston) use their knowledge of apocalyptic films (also on the SyFy
Channel) to figure out how to save the world.

They work at “Movie Shack, Home of the Disaster”. Dr. Walter Brown (Brad Dourif) insists on
being put through to the Pentagon, because he knows how to fix it, like he was
special! The fix is to launch a nuclear
warhead to land inside an open pit mine in Siberia. I’m not sure what sense this makes, other
than to break up the current cold wave, that originates from Siberia.

What really ought to be done, is to make a docudrama of what
would happen if a Carrington-sized solar storm and CME hit the Earth today,
with its advanced technological infrastructure, and vulnerable power grid. We apparently had a narrow miss in July 2012,
which we didn’t learn about until the Spring of 2014.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

“The Blacklist”, with James Spader (who talks like Nolan
Ross in “Revenge”) presented, in “The Kenyon Family”, a somewhat believable “extreme
right” cultist terror threat is proposed.
In eastern Tennessee, the Kenyons maintain a large estate that resembles
David Koresh at Waco, except that they allow other criminals to store WMD’s
(especially Syntex) on their property.
They also have a polygamy system (lke Colorado City, AZ), but resulting
in exiling of many boys, who have formed their own terror group. In the meantime, the cult also practices
brainwashing or mind control that sends people to various locations in cars to
act as suicide bombers, with massive explosions capable of obliterating whole
city blocks. The brainwashing somewhat
resembles the idea of “Manchurian Candidate” programming, as well as the “brain
triggering” with free sim cards in the recent movie “Kingsman: The Secret
Service” (Movies Feb. 15). The episode, like "Kingsman", also had a scene of a mass "suicide" at a church service.

The Kenyon group also has an “end of days” theology claiming
that the family will inherit the world and that Kenyon will rise to become an
angel. A real angel, if you met him,
would be something else (more like a Clark Kent).

The group is also shown as wanting to have a sovereign country within the southern Appalachians, threatening other property nearby, in a manner comparable to ISIL, as if this sort of "cult plus conquest" movement is possible with any religion or belief, not just Islam. CNN has been discussing the "sovereign citizen" problem as involving up to 300000 people in the US, and they also litigate with "paper terrorism."

The episode seems relevant given recent talk that ISIS us a “doomsday
cult” within Islam, trying to set up a caliphate for Armageddon. It also could be compared to Jim Jones and The
People’s Temple, which was a far Leftist cult that committed mass suicide in
1978.

I guess the other obvious mental association for me might be Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas. But their activity is just demonstrations and (anti-gay hate) speech.

Tuesday, February 17, 2015

There was a concept in the season finale to NBC’s “State of
Affairs”, called “Deadcheck”, that deserves honorable mention on this
weblog. (Maybe “Deadwire” or “Millstone”
could have been an episode title, -- perhaps even "Bedcheck".)

The central character, CIA operative “Charlie” (Katherine
Heigl) quits the CIA to go after a terrorist in the Middle East, Omar Fatah
(Farshad Farahat), and at the end, she executes him, letting him suffer a
moment. The “seventh floor” (rather like
the phantom floor for John Malkovich) helps her, but the whole concept is
rather like replacing an entire Navy Seal team (that took out Osama bin Laden)
with one woman (like in Ridley Scott’s 1997 film “G.I. Jane” with Demi Moore,
from Hollywood (Disney) Pictures.

But it is the terror concept that is rather scary. The terrorists have picked out cities in the
United States to endure suicide bombers according to how their geographic
positions map to the stars in the constellation Pegasus. Cities that wind up on the list include
Minneapolis, Houston and San Antonio. Charlie figures it out by looking at a
clear sky in the mountains (in Afghanistan).

All pretty contrived stuff. Constellations don’t really mean anything now.
(Space weather – solar storms – sounds like a much more real
threat to me.) But it sounds like an idea somebody might even try.

Don;t confuse this show with "State of Play", a 2003 TV series or 2009 film (April 17, 2009 on Movies blog.)

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

ABC affiliate WJLA aired the “Town Hall: Fight for Freedom:
Your Voice, Your Future” from its headquarters in the Rosslyn “downtown” area
of Arlington VA, almost on the Potomac River.

This broadcast is the latest in a
series of Roundtables (half hour, no audience) and Townhalls (one hour, with
studio audience) aired at 7 PM EST on
some weeknights on News Channel 8 in Washington. I was in the audience, on the second row, and
this time the event was in the Second Floor Studio of the building, rather than
in the Arisphere (which is larger and which is easier to move around in).

There was a technical issue in that we could not hear some
of the outside feeds during the show.

The panelists were Frank Gaffney from the Center for
Security Policy (link), Clifford May from Foundation for Defense of Democracies (link) Jane Hall, journalism professor at
American University (link), and Faheem Younus (“Muslimerican”,link) as well
as, remote, Representative Scott Perry (R-PA), direct line from
Harrisburg. Jeff Barnum moderated.

Scott Thuman reported on several stories, including a
decision by Japan not to allow its journalists to travel to Syria and Iraq,
after the recent execution of another Japanese journalist by ISIS. He also reported on a blizzard of “copythreat”
threats against commercial airline flights on Twitter, which can be traced and
can result in 5 years in prison. Another
clip concerns the use of flashy social media to recruit young men and women
from western countries, a campaign that works mostly in Europe but that has
resulted in the arrests of a few young people from the US.

One of the audience, a Muslim woman, challenged Gaffney for
his alleges support of Islamaphobia.
Later questions concerned whether the US should put “boots on the ground”
in Syria. But the most important
question may have been those concerned about how journalists can continue
honest reporting, when ISIS attacks them and executes them. The honest answer was, maybe, we can’t. Totalitarian societies go to great lengths to
prevent information about what is going on to get out.

But the most sobering moment came when Gaffney mentioned
Salman Rushdie, the target of a fatwa from Iran in the early 1980s for the book
“Satanic Verses”. True, the threat came
from Shiite rather than Sunni Islam. But
it shows that the concern isn’t limited to just drawings and cartoons. Gaffney said that European nations should
have withdrawn diplomats from Iran immediately.
Instead, they told Rushdie, a British subject and definitely not a
resident or subject of Iran or any other Muslim country, to hire bodyguards and
that “he had a problem.” That is when
free speech in the west became jeopardized.

As for the cartoons, Younus said that not publishing images
of Muhammad should be a matter of conscience, not law, but he compared the
practice to using the “n” or “f” words in the US (to refer to “blacks” or “gays”).

Later Younus got into a debate with the other panelists on
whether there is something in Islam that condones violence against non-Muslim
civilians as justified by religious scripture.
There was some discussion of the scope of Sharia law, particularly when
it deals with secular interactions with non-Muslims. Some of it got heated. There was a suggestion, from Gaffney at least, that the point of the ISIS behavior extends beyond scripture to simply a need to control others ("apostates") as part of the ideology, a religious analogue to Hitler or Stalin (or Kim Jong-Un).

The audience included several Muslims, and several
journalism students from American University.
I was in the queue to ask a question but time ran out. So I asked the question of the panelists in
person after the broadcast. I was going
to ask them to comment on the (Cato Institute) book “The Tyranny of Silence” by
Flemming Rose from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, at the time of the
Cartoon Controversy in 2005. The book
was written before the assassination of Charlie Hebdo and other journalists in
Paris in January 2015. I would have
mentioned Moly Norris. Gaffney
immediately reacted to my mentioning her name, and regretted likewise not
having time (in just one hour) to get to the implications of how her situation
was handled by the FBI (similar to Rushdie, who did not go into hiding or
change names). I don’t think we have a word in our vocabulary
for this problem, it’s a kind of “socialization-induced chilling effects” familiar
in ganga and organized crime. Alfred
Hitchcock has explored this problem (as close as ever in cinema) with his two versions of “The Man Who Knew
Too Much”.

This forum could have used a full 90 minutes.

Update (later 2/10): NBC News just released a news story about hacking social media of a military spouse, here. This is along the lines of the Town Hall, but in a critical area we didn't have enough time to cover.

Thursday, February 05, 2015

Jennifer Azano (also known as Jennifer Garango) has a 2011
55-minute film on Netflix, “8:46”, which depicts, in Robert Altman style, the
lives of a variety of New York City families and individuals starting on Sept.
10 and leading to the crash on the North Tower at 8:46. It first happens 16 minutes before the end of
the film, from the view of a Manhattan highrise penthouse, where a young man
has read his wife’s positive pregnancy test.

In one of the families, a father has gotten has gay son an
internship in the World Trade Center and is pestering him about showing up on
time dressed properly. There is a lot of
tension at the family dinner.

In another sequence, a boss counsels an employee on the 102nd
floor about her being “distracted” on the job and tries to help her with
personal issues.

There is also a sequence in a NYC firehouse, where a
firefighter says he will become a father.

The film takes the morning through the first 90 minutes
after 8:46, past the crash in Pennsylvania in the media.

Tuesday, February 03, 2015

Should civilian Americans, most of all those in Texas,
particularly South Texas (and maybe other border states) be concerned that drug
cartel violence in Mexico could endanger them? Associated with the cartels
would be a form of “piracy”.

CNN re-aired its report “Murder in Mexico” about the murder
of David Hartley, dumped in Falcon Lake on the Texas-Mexico border at Zapata
County, after the couple (with wife Tiffany Hartley) had gone boating looking
for a half-submerged old church. The
story is here.

The report seemed to suggest that the cartels that use the
lake have an unwritten code not to disturb uninvolved civilians. But mistakes happen.

The right wing has been saying that a porous border would
allow Al Qaeda terrorists to come through Mexico.

Landowners, especially in southern Arizona, have run into
legal issues defending their property against random illegals. That’s a whole business for law firms in
Phoenix.

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